These are some valid points.
In the meantime I'm following the fake pubkeys discussion and it becomes apparent to me, that it's above my pay grade.
I did get caught up in tribalism early in the discussion and I'm slowly untangling from it.
I doubt though, that all the people involved in this discussion are against spam/etherisation. Probably some are just trolling, but some have evident conflicts of interest. This remains my concern, but I don't know what to do with it.
The proposals and the approach of the Knots camp are not always ideal, but I see genuine concerns and sincere attempts to defend bitcoin. That's why I reacted to your initial post. They iterate their proposals, work on them, gather feedback and seek agreement. To me this seems fair.
I'm going to follow the discussion still, but I'll try to refrain from statements about issues I don't fully understand.
Replies (2)
I don't think pubkeys are above your pay grade. This is actually quite simple. Most Bitcoin address are a result of hash function (except prefixes etc.). The output of any hash function is deterministic, but also looks random (it's not random, but you can't tell what and if it contains any information). So , because this random look of the address, we can't tell if the address is modified or not to contain spam. Even if an address looks like it's modified, you also can't exclude possibility it's valid. That's why it's so difficult (actually impossible) to filter them out. The spammers have to include additional data markers to recognize their own spam. Once we know what markers they use, we can set a filter. But, at that point they can just change the markers and we start from scratch updating the filters. Cat and mice game ;)
Hope it makes sense.
Unfortunately it's only one of many pieces in this whole debate about spam :(
Thanks!
Do I get it right: in the end the main discussion seems to be: is it worth it or not to play the whack-a-mole game? One rabbi says it's worth it, the other says it's not.
